Urrah! Pt.2 -Getting my Soviets Sorted

I've been scraping and sorting out my Heroic Defenders of the Workers and Peasants Revolution since Hotlead. Since I'm wanting to play both small Chain of Command sized fights and bigger IABSM engagements anywhere from the summer of 1941 until the storming of Berlin some flexibility is required. Although it appears that my SMG platoons won't be suitable for the early battles at all.

The lists in the Chain of Command rulebook are aimed at late war, 1943 and on. Same with my IABSM army list supplement Vpered Na Berlin. But on the Lard Island News Blog there are very nice FREE downloads for all sorts of forces for Chain of Command. In particular Germans and Soviets for Barbarossa here. Whilst I was there I did a poke around and downloaded the 1939 and '40 German infantry lists, plus lists for the Poles and French. Because you never know. Preparedness is all, as they say.

This week a nice package arrived from the Mad Padre containing reinforcements for the Mantovsky Shock Army from his lead pile. Three sprues from a PSC Soviet Heavy Weapons box have netted me a platoon each of three Maxim MMGs and three 81mm mortars (their minimum range is short enough that they could be on the table in IABSM), plus 3 fellows carrying the PTRD anti-tank rifle and three PTRD teams firing. The PSC figures were fiddly to assemble and some poses are a bit naff. The Maxim MMGs are missing a number 2 with ammunition box, which I think is an odd omission, but free is good. I used some extra mortar crew to make extra machine gun crew. The Padre also included three Battlefront 50mm mortar teams, which I like better than the PSC, so I left them and the 120mm mortars on the sprues.

After priming with Krylon khaki spray paint, I block painted some test figures with basic face, hands, boots, weapon and helmet then a brown wash with this result:

Basic block painting

After brown ink wash

Soviet uniforms were pretty monochromatic. My Osprey book shows the kit and bed roll to be the same colour as the uniforms. Plus the castings are from some old moulds, so a fast and easy paint job is all we need here.